Bob's Debian nVidia Notes Page

This page is now obsolete but saved for historical use.

The information on this page applied to Debian Woody and the nVidia version 2880 driver. Woody has been replaced with Sarge. The nVidia version for released at the time Sarge released was version 7174. Since then nVidia has changed their distribution license terms and it is now permissable to distribute the driver. That makes the information on this page doubly obsolete. But I am going to keep this page here for a little bit longer as historical record of what I needed to do on the old Debian Woody system to make this work.

Installing the proprietary nVidia driver.

The nVidia driver is a closed source proprietary driver. It cannot be legally shipped with a free software distribution. Therefore if you wish to use this driver then you must agree with their license, download it from nVidia, and build it for your system. If you don't like doing this then support free software. You can either use the free "nv" driver which unfortunately is not as capable or ask nVidia to change their license into a free license.

Get the bits onto your machine

If you are going to be installing offline then you will need to get the NVIDIA_*tar.gz files from nVidia prior to doing the installation.

cd /usr/src
wget http://205.158.109.140/XFree86_40/1.0-2880/NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-2880.tar.gz
wget http://205.158.109.140/XFree86_40/1.0-2880/NVIDIA_GLX-1.0-2880.tar.gz

Use the Debian source installer packages.

cd /usr/src
sudo apt-get install nvidia-kernel-src nvidia-glx-src
sudo apt-get install kernel-source-2.4.20

Build the kernel modules

cd /usr/src
tar xzf nvidia-kernel-src.tar.gz # /usr/src/modules/...
tar xjf kernel-source-2.4.20.tar.bz2
cd kernel-source-2.4.20
cp /boot/config-2.4.20-2-k7 .config
make-kpkg clean
fakeroot make-kpkg --append_to_version -2-k7 modules_image
cd /usr/src
sudo dpkg -i nvidia-kernel-*.deb

Build the graphics drivers

cd /usr/src/nvidia-glx-1.0.2880
fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc
cd /usr/src
sudo dpkg -i nvidia-glx*.deb # two packages {,-dev}

Configure X for this driver

... edit /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 ...
Driver "nvidia"
Option "UseFBDev" "true"
Option "NoLogo" "true"

Remove from /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 the following drivers. 

GLcore # OpenGL support (conflicts with nvidia)
dri # Direct rendering infrastructure (conflicts with nvidia)

Leave only these modules in the list. 

dbe # Double-buffering
extmod # Misc. required extensions
glx # OpenGL X protocol interface
type1

Reference Information

/usr/share/doc/kernel-package/README.gz